Lavillastrangiato Deputy Loremaster Application (two) (2)

[La Villa Strangiato]

A bit of this is copypasted from my old app as I think that is still relevant and whatnot.

Ckey/BYOND Username: Lavillastrangiato
Position Being Applied For: Deputy Loremaster
Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page?: Yes!
Past Experiences/Knowledge: I have been writing creatively for eight years now, and I've been roleplaying (in TTRPGs, forums, and online games) for twelve years. My experience is in both fiction and non-fiction writing, such as essays, and I've contributed and helped proofread a lot of lore for this community.
Examples of Past Work:

Medina expansion

CEO expansion

A Bursa page which will be added to this application once it has passed muster from my sensitivity reader, and been posted on the forums

A brief note identifying the course and creative direction that you'd hopefully like to pursue: I want to see Aurora lore focus less on geopolitics, and more on the corporations of the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate. I have always felt that the bleak, corporatised future of 2465 feels somewhat under-emphasized, especially in Tau Ceti, and I would love to see and create more lore that centres around the shadowy machinations of capitalist bickering. This is not to say I would like to significantly cut back on geopolitics content, as I do find it makes the setting feel more active and higher-stakes. However, I would enjoy bringing more relationships between the SCC to the forefront. The Titan Rises is an example of an arc that I'd like to see more of, and I'd also like to focus more on how the expansion of corporate influence affects the average citizen.

Criticism of the current state of lore: Often, I find that some pages are excessively detailed in ways that do not contribute to the development of a character. Some planets have very long, extensive sections on history (Visegrad, Xanu Prime, and Damascus II are the ones I note) that could be greatly condensed or simply made more accessible to the average reader; Aurora is already very reading-heavy, and if you're creating a character, a lot of this text simply becomes irrelevant. To me, less is more, and I think we should be painting a more general idea of a planet, how it is organized, and its history than overwhelming the reader. This also puts less pressure on not just our lore team, but also the people who submit canonization applications to write a lot. "Kill your darlings", as the saying goes.

What do you believe you can bring to the team as Deputy Loremaster?: I think I can bring new ideas and a fresh perspective to a lore team that has a fairly self-contained population. I am a good copy-editor who can comfortably read over a lot of text, and I've had informal experience in working with a team of people to work towards a goal. I've always considered myself a good communicator, and I think that's a major part of being DLM.

Your thoughts on me as a loremaster, and how best you think you can assist me: I think you are a pretty no-bullshit guy (which is a compliment) and I think you have a personality that is well-suited to reining more fanciful impulses in. I think I'd be best suited to helping you on copy-editing, proofreading, and lobbing more out-there ideas at you, which you are free to restrict or expand on as you're able.

Additional Notes:

 

[Flpfs]

"To me, less is more, and I think we should be painting a more general idea of a planet, how it is organized, and its history than overwhelming the reader."

Would you be against lore canonizations that added content to new planets? Such as, sports, holidays, TV shows, and more? If yes, why? Would adding them in a more laconic matter be enough?

"...I would love to see and create more lore that centres around the shadowy machinations of capitalist bickering."

I have read complaints that megacorporation lore is seen as bland, and that players are generally unwilling to engage with it besides acknowledging it. Even Biesel itself is seen as bland and generic, with the majority of the veteran playerbase having their characters from other backgrounds.

How do you plan on making events and new lore regarding megacorporations and the dystopic setting that Aurora is centered on a way that could garner more attention?

 

I think this application is interesting because it has an unique proposal to the table. I would be thankful if you could answer these two questions.

 

[La Villa Strangiato]

On 03/09/2023 at 01:18, Flpfs said:

Would you be against lore canonizations that added content to new planets? Such as, sports, holidays, TV shows, and more? If yes, why? Would adding them in a more laconic matter be enough?

The short answer is no, I wouldn't be opposed. To elaborate further, when I say that certain aspects of planetary lore feel bloated or do not contribute to the development of a character, let's take a look at this piece of lore on the Damascus II page:

Quote

In this era immediately after the Captain’s death, the planet experienced a population boom in which more cities were established along the coasts of Damascus II’s central ring, and numerous smaller towns were established throughout the planet’s interior in order to cultivate the vast untouched Damascene lands. The planetary government enacted subsidies to aid these new settlers, paying for their expeditions into the interior of the planet’s continents to establish communities and farms that would then send their profits back to the central cities of the planet.

It's not even that this piece of lore is bad. There's nothing wrong with reading this sentence on the wiki, but how does it contribute to creating a character? You mention sports, holidays, TV shows; I love reading about stuff like that, because it's stuff your character can just casually bring up in a conversation. If you have a character who plays basketball as a hobby, maybe they could bring up the latest game between the Flagsdale Hornets and the Phoenix Park Firebirds. Recently Damascene Independence Day happened in-game and that was fun, because my Elyran character got something to bring up! And some of my characters' friends mentioned "oh, it's Damascene Independence Day, it must be an important day for Gülay". This was a small interaction, but it allowed me to show a little bit of my character's pride in her nation, despite that she's previously been critical of Elyra's government. It allowed me to show my character's personality. In my opinion, that's what planetary lore should focus on doing, first and foremost.

And I don't even mind the little gritty details of a planet's colonization being mentioned, but stuff like Xanu Prime has no less than eleven drop-down subsections in its history section. When we reach that point, I think we need to be more mindful of what we add to a planet's lore, and why.

On 03/09/2023 at 01:18, Flpfs said:

I have read complaints that megacorporation lore is seen as bland, and that players are generally unwilling to engage with it besides acknowledging it. Even Biesel itself is seen as bland and generic, with the majority of the veteran playerbase having their characters from other backgrounds.

How do you plan on making events and new lore regarding megacorporations and the dystopic setting that Aurora is centered on a way that could garner more attention?

I have mentioned The Titan Rises already as an arc that I found particularly compelling in that regard, but given that a lot of Cyberpunk-style corporate espionage is, well, espionage, it's difficult to put that front-and-centre in our setting through an article or an arc that happens on the SCCV Horizon.

So what do we do? I don't want to "current event" too hard, but we see shitty corporate practices that get high-profile attention before fading; I think it's entirely possible to centre an arc around stuff like that. I think Idris, Zavodskoi, and Zeng-Hu are rife for potential controversies, from unethical practices, to selling weapons to conflict zones (as it's mentioned in Zavodskoi's wiki page!), or literally anything with IRUs. I also think developing the Big Five CEOs in general would help a lot with bringing a little more interest from the playerbase, which is what I was trying to do with my CEO lore app. If characters are talking about how weird John CEO is, it's a form of engagement with the lore, and that feels like a success in my book.

You brought up Biesel, though, and I'd like to finish this post off with this point; I think any "starting origin" in a roleplay setting is plagued by complaints of "it's boring and generic", even if that is not necessarily so. I personally think Biesel has some very interesting setting points, but it suffers from being what is more or less Space America in a sea of far more intriguing, novel options. I myself only have an IPC as a Biesel accent character! If Biesel has a weak point, I don't think the megacorp-centric nature of it is so.

Thank you for your questions! I've done a lot of thinking about them.

Edited September 4, 2023 by La Villa Strangiato
adds 1 extra sentence

[La Villa Strangiato]

So I've been considering, after I read Kyres' application, about talking about plans for the structure of the lore team, rather than just lore developments. Looking through my previous application and some of the notes I had during that period, I want to compile this together into a more consistent roadmap/set of plans for the structure, and some Hot Button Issues^TM that I'd like to touch on.

1. Accessibility for new players. I'm not going to bullshit you here, reader; in a community like SS13, it is not only okay to gatekeep, but it should be expected. If people on the SS13 subreddit choose not to join Aurora because of a post going "wah wah HRP Melariara banned me, I only said the n-word one morbillion times", that is a good thing. Nobody wants the average Internet chud playing on this server.

But there are definitely ways that we should make being a new player accessible. At the moment, the beginner lore primer is somewhat disjointed, a little overly long, and makes you think "wait, where should I start if I'm totally new?" You can move on to the character creation guide, which, while explaining some key elements of our lore (e.g. that Sol is no longer the centre of the galaxy), it doesn't really tell you what the loadout screen looks like, doesn't really tell you how to customize your character, doesn't link to the Aurora character records generator or the Baystation paperwork simulator tool, and is also pissing me off with all those headers. We've always expected a certain amount of reading to be done to properly get into this server, but immediately linking to five lore guides is a good way to overwhelm a newbie, especially when SS13 is already esoteric in terms of controls.

My proposed solution is cleaning up the new player pages, taking a reader through an example of character creation, and truncating what lore is fed to a new player, perhaps by a Star Wars-style title crawl on the lore primer. This is also a great way to ensure people read the wiki at all; making sure the first pages they encounter are reliable.

An example:

Quote

 

It is the year 2465 CE. Humanity has spread across the stars, colonizing thousands of star systems and hundreds of planets. The Orion Spur, the section of the Milky Way galaxy that all known sapient lifeforms inhabit, is dominated economically by six galactic-spanning megacorporations, who have recently banded together to form the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate.

At the head of the Conglomerate, the biomedical company of NanoTrasen, headed by Miranda Trasen, is rapidly struggling for relevance amidst the worsening shortage of the fantastically powerful element of Phoron. While NanoTrasen once dominated all other corporations and several governments with its monopoly on the element, it has recently lost its economic footing in the former centre of humanity, the Sol Alliance, and the technologically-advanced Serene Republic of Elyra.

In a bid to solve the shortage, the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate has launched a flagship to explore the stars; the SCCV Horizon. Comprised of employees from five megacorporations, as well as other alien species that exist alongside humanity, time will tell if the Conglomerate's bid for increasing dominance proves successful, particularly against the machinations of their rival, Einstein Engines.

You are an employee of one of the five constituents of the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate: the leader in all things phoron, NanoTrasen, the industry titan Hephaestus Industries, the banking conglomerate Idris Incorporated, the pharmaceuticals giant Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals, the major arms manufacturer Zavodskoi Interstellar, and the Spur-spanning shipping company Orion Express.

 

2. Event guidelines. This is pretty simple to set up; write a more structured guideline on not only how to run events, but what supplies should be given to crewmembers in more intense events, and how to approach griefy/OOC-motivated behaviour in events. Developing a role for lore writers to have may also factor into this so that they may better run events, but this is a decision best assisted by the administration team and the maintainers.

3. Scheduling. As I've expressed in my previous application, I felt Dreary Futures and Amor Patriae dragged on, and could have been remedied by periods of letting the arc breathe while we focus on other developments. I think a lot of the times arcs go out when they're ready, and I'd like to have more structured, timeline-based posting of article arcs so that players can be drip-fed steadily, don't have to talk about just one thing ICly, and that the team can have less pressure on them to be trying to fill the space.

4. Activity, obligations, etc. I've mentioned in my previous applications that Diona lore is a very weak link in our species lore because they have no arcs where they're prominent, no developments in the species they're tied to, and their pages are considerably barebones next to other species. Perhaps because of this, they are not particularly popular as a whitelist. There are definitely other species that have activity problems, and I've said that while I don't like putting big quotas and obligations on a volunteer team's shoulders, this is a situation that we need to avoid. I want my above point of scheduling more strictly to hopefully inspire more lore development and arc content from the teams, but that's also going to require communication and collaboration between the teams. Which leads me to my next point...

5. Team communique. I don't know everything about the lore team because I'm not part of it, but the general problem I've heard from my friends who are in it is that some people are less receptive to creating content together, and some teams aren't interested in cooperation with other teams due to being burned in the past.

This is unambiguously something we need to move past and work together on. The lore team today is not anywhere close to the horror stories I've heard from 2018. We're all grown adults, we can all express our concerns and reservations in an open forum, and if we have beef with each other, we need to be mature and work past it while we write together. Again, this is something I don't know much about because I don't know the team dynamic, but I have confidence we simply need to be more upfront with each other.

[Zelmana]

I believe that some recent additions to the lore and therefore wiki are horrendously bloated. You can add a lot of things to the wiki, and canonize a lot of lore. However, allowing so many wiki entries to be so purple in prose is detrimental to having a quick understanding of the history, context, and current affairs of different planets and cultures. While this may be more of a feedback for the wiki team, I think Lore Devs have a big responsibility here to prune where appropriate.

Based on Lavilla's desires to consolidate some lore and create a better primer environment that is friendly to new players, while also trying to trim down extra fluff, I support them. I think it's needed.

That being stated, after reviewing some of the opposing candidates positions, I think it best for someone more tenured to lead. I would still like to see my above points addressed in overall lore.

Edited September 4, 2023 by Zelmana

[RustingWithYou]

I asked a lot of questions on the previous app, so for all of our sakes I won't repeat them here. While I don't necessarily agree with all your ideas on the direction lore should be taken, but I think you're good at both writing and managing people, and while deputy LM is still a head staff position, it is also a deputy one well-suited to learning the role and responsibilites. Though there's some strong competition, I'm happy to leave a heartfelt endorsement of your application.

[canon35]

Have any of your responses or views shared to answer these questions changed? If so, why?

[La Villa Strangiato]

1 hour ago, canon35 said:

Have any of your responses or views shared to answer these questions changed? If so, why?

LET'S GO THROUGH THEM SHALL WE

1. Do you feel that in some cases, lore for a species needs to be curtailed or altered to better be consistent with a vision for aurora lore as a whole? If so, what's some lore from a species you feel needs to be changed?

My answer here hasn't really changed; kill your darlings, make your lore accessible, make Skrell less gigachungus instant-win buttons, and I still hold my petty opinion on Tajaran name lore.

Otherwise, I think most of the lore that's currently in the game is pretty good, and doesn't need grand alterations, but I'm always willing to listen to player or team member critique about it.

2. Do you think you're able to stand your ground in the event that a lore writer takes massive issue against your rulings as lore master deputy, such as blocking a project they've been working on from being canonized?

The only way in which my answer has changed is yes, I would be able to stand my ground. If someone can't communicate that they want to make large sweeping changes, and discuss them with the team first, I have to cut them off.

3 and 4: My answers here hasn't changed.

5. How will you try to make lore more accessible for new players?

This answer hasn't changed too much. I expressed previously that I wanted to edit the New Player Lore Guide and the Character Creation guides, and you can see my proposed edits in the links. I think that having these pages greatly helps new players who want to read the wiki, though we obviously need to account for making the wiki a little more straightforward overall.

I've mentioned previously truncating some of the lore and condensing it down to things that can be used and spoken about IC, and I think this is a relevant thing to include in this question. Lore is fun, but we want players to spend more time playing rather than reading.

6, 7, and 8: My answers for these haven't changed either.

[GeneralCamo]

You've shown willingness to kill darlings. You directly addressed my collaborative canon app as being "too large", but praised its organization. You gave well-rounded reasonings behind it, and got us to streamline it greatly. 

I think your interactions with Kyres are concerning, but one of you is what we need. We need a shakeup of the status quo. And I fully agree with the need to streamline things for the sake of accessibility, especially for new players.

For now both you and Kyres are on my shortlist. I look forward to further interactions with both of you to narrow it further. 

[NewOriginalSchwann]

Hello, and thank you for applying! I have a few questions to ask — sorry for taking so long to post these, the week has been more hectic than I had hoped for.

 

1). Have your answers to any of my previous questions changed?

 

2). You, in this application and your previous one, devote a good amount of time to discussing the concepts of “KISS (keep it simple, stupid)” and “kill your darlings.” What, in your view, needs to be cut down and how would you go about doing this?

 

3). To build upon my previous question, would you continue to pursue “killing your darlings” if you faced opposition from the writer, or writers, of the original piece of work?

 

4). How would you deal with a member of the lore team who was confrontational in discussions?

 

5). How would you deal with a member of the lore team who refuses to work with other teams? 

 

6). How would you deal with inactivity by members of teams, or by an entire team?

 

7). If you are not hired, would you be willing to continue working on wiki improvements such as the ones you suggested in your original post?

 

Thank you for your time, and good luck!

[La Villa Strangiato]

9 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

1). Have your answers to any of my previous questions changed?

Surprisingly they have not!

 

9 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

2). You, in this application and your previous one, devote a good amount of time to discussing the concepts of “KISS (keep it simple, stupid)” and “kill your darlings.” What, in your view, needs to be cut down and how would you go about doing this?

I've elaborated some on this in this comment...

To elaborate further, I want to make our lore more accessible, and to do that I want to cut down on the fluff that doesn't contribute to traits to develop a character from. I've said, with varying degrees of seriousness depending on my level of elaboration, that filtering people who just don't want to read is an expected part of a setting that's so huge, and if someone's not even going to bother with reading the basics we shouldn't cater to them. But there is a lot of pages that aren't accessible even to a dedicated reader because there's so much written down. And not all of it is really relevant to a character, as I mentioned in the linked post!

I struggle to properly elucidate on my point here, so let me direct you to some of my favourite lore pages and explain why I think they're good.

1. Aemaq. (Yes, Schwann, I know you wrote this ;)) To me, Aemaq is kind of the platonic ideal of Elyra lore pages because the "schtick" of the planet is immediately obvious; it's covered in chemical seas, and most of the economy comes from filtering these seas and, as is common in Elyra, the phoron industry. Its history section is relatively brief and straightforward; it was colonized because of its economic value, and much of its ability for colonization came from Medina's magpulse drive. The Leviathans are such a neat addition, and they remain relatively mysterious while a neat anecdote about them helping a sinking ship is elaborated on on the page. The quotes on the sections really drive the culture home, and I found it very easy to envision the standup routine of the Aemaqii comedian, gestures, interjections of audience laughter, and all (but that's fairly subjective).
2. Port Antillia. While some of the sections are a bit long for my taste and could stand to be trimmed a bit, I find Port Antillia a very refreshing, interesting read for its groundedness (it's fucked up because of natural disasters and the general poverty of its colonizing nation in the first place) and its ability to stay in touch with lore that is used to develop a character. Much of the history section is stuff that would be directly affecting a character from Port Antillia, and it's easy to see why they, as opposed to Mictlan, wouldn't oppose being part of Biesel due to the Republic's proximity. There's also language lore where some Antilles speak primarily Sol Common, and others speak Tradeband; the tones of an Antillean's voice as a shibboleth for where they're from is such a perfect thing to include in your flavour text or incorporate into a character. Also, SPORTS LORE.
3. Europa. (hey wait this is another schwann page) Is it Literally Barotrauma? Yes. Europa, however, is a good lore page to me because there's a lot of thought that went into how a character from such an alien environment would act; quiet, superstitious, and very accustomed to deep space and ship life. I think the corporate integration with the page, with Zeng-Hu and Idris having large bases on the planet, is another good addition just because it adds so much to the atmosphere. You have Idris, with its anodyne, Instagram-influencer glitz, setting up shop on a planet of grizzled, suspicious sailors to ferry unsuspecting tourists around a truly alien sea; it gives me Mystery Flesh Pit National Park vibes. Zeng-Hu's presence makes sense not only because of the Skrell there (the Skrell are a fantastic addition to Europa, by the way), but because it's the perfect place for them to do messed-up experiments and questionably ethical research.

To sum it all up, the stuff I want to keep at the forefront of a lore page is stuff that is obvious to incorporate into a character. Personally, if I were tasked to oversee the writing of a new planet or nation-state, I would want the lore team to come up with a few key events that they could write around and be fairly distinct in the planet's history. Is that strictly realistic? No, but we can't demand realism all the time from our funny spaceman game, and it's acceptable to leave some room for player interpretation between the lines.

11 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

3). To build upon my previous question, would you continue to pursue “killing your darlings” if you faced opposition from the writer, or writers, of the original piece of work?

Yes, that's the point of killing your darlings. Things that are much beloved must sometimes be cut, and as we are a team effort, I would expect my team to do the same for me if they edited my work. That isn't to say I wouldn't want to listen to someone's reasoning for why they want to keep something in, and it would be normal if they pushed back against me or tried to argue why certain stuff that I wanted to edit out should be kept in. In fact, I would do the same! Ultimately I would hope that editing discussions could be approached in a constructive way, even if people disagreed on it.

11 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

4). How would you deal with a member of the lore team who was confrontational in discussions?

That depends on the scale and the length of the behaviour. If someone is continuously being aggressive towards other team members, is refusing to budge or take criticism on their opinions, their work, or their idea of direction for [insert topic here] for a long period of time, I'd want to discuss the problem with either the loremaster or the moderation staff before directly confronting the individual in question. It's an ultimatum; if someone can't treat their fellow team members respectfully, then their presence on the team should not be tolerated.

That said, everyone has bad days, pet topics that they get a little emotional over, and arguments are just kind of part of the human condition. Not everything is a mod issue, and if someone's being belligerent in a discussion once or twice, I would simply tell them to calm down, disengage, and touch grass.

11 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

5). How would you deal with a member of the lore team who refuses to work with other teams?

On 03/09/2023 at 15:06, La Villa Strangiato said:

[...] but the general problem I've heard from my friends who are in it is that some people are less receptive to creating content together, and some teams aren't interested in cooperation with other teams due to being burned in the past.

Sometimes, I make friends with people. Sometimes, these people don't like each other for some reason or another. This is usually how I hear about it;

1. Person A grouches about a slight they were dealt by Person B to me.
2. I "subtly" ask Person B about this slight, and they elaborate that they felt Person A was treating them poorly (but Person A did not realise), they were Going Through It, or circumstances happened that Person B's hand was forced and it made them look like a bit of a jerk.

Nobody ever thinks that they're the bad guy in confrontations with people, but usually the result is that both people contribute to the problem whether they realise it or not. If Lore Staff A is going to tell me that Lore Staff B doesn't want to work with them, I'd want to approach it gently; hey, Lore Staff A felt kind of upset that you didn't really talk to them or respond about Lore Idea C, and they get the impression you refuse to work with them. What happened?

This usually allows a dam of feelings to be opened, and surprise surprise, once the dam has been broken, two people are usually a lot more accepting of an open conversation between each other. This definitely isn't a sure occurrence, but it happens more often than not.

Even if two people continue to not like each other, they still have to work with each other; that's something I'd want to emphasize with two parties.

12 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

6). How would you deal with inactivity by members of teams, or by an entire team?

Inactivity happens. We're adults with lives, and nobody who plays Space Station 13 is entirely well-adjusted. Some people just got some shit going on.

If someone hasn't been actively contributing to discussions for let's say, three months, I'd want to check in with them and ask them how it's going. I'd want to ask them how long they might be inactive for, if they think they can still muster up the ability to be lore staff, or maybe they just need a poke to be reminded. Sometimes there are underlying problems in team-related areas, and those need to be discussed as well; solving them would probably be me and the Loremaster's job!

If someone says, "I am going to be inactive for [amount of time]", I would be much more lenient on giving them that time. If it's a period of over 6-8 months, I would probably gently ask them to consider rescinding their position, as I wouldn't want their team to be bogged down with the demands of two deputies.

12 hours ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

7). If you are not hired, would you be willing to continue working on wiki improvements such as the ones you suggested in your original post?

I'm already doing them and working on implementing them, they just need a look-over by Trio. if I don't get hired, I'm just going to continue adding stuff as I feel like, and applying via lore canonization; the only lore areas I'm particularly interested in maintaining are human lore (not losing a member anytime soon), Vaurca lore (just received a member) and potentially Unathi lore.

Thank you for your questions!